


madness, this greedy heart

by syzygysm



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Kink Meme, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-26
Updated: 2011-07-26
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:26:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syzygysm/pseuds/syzygysm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I could fall in love, she thinks</p>
            </blockquote>





	madness, this greedy heart

Love, Ariadne thinks. _Love_.

Madness, this greedy heart. There and gone, just one moment, breathless and quiet and loud like an orchestra with a touch too much brass, echoing. Falling, dizzying, these messy-stray lines – here I am, here I am. And where are you, a compass wavering toward magnetic north, here is your bed with its silvered corners, shall I lie in it, weighed down, so heavy I could fly. Sailing to that horizon, where there’s smoke there is fire, but fire without smoke, is that something else, what is that. Fractions, there are no fractions, no halves or thirds, no decimals that look like periods, the start of an ellipses, an unfinished comma. A greedy heart is a fragile heart and a fragile heart is a heart waiting to be broken, and still here it is, uncolored want, here. Here I am.

I could fall in love, she thinks.

+

She chooses Eames, first.

Maybe it starts with a crush: a flirtatious tilt to his mouth, a touch that lingers too long. Details, she focuses on the details: they’re mismatched, just a little, the way she likes lines, this is where we begin and this is where we end. She likes numbers, one and three and nine but never thirteen. But Eames, Eames doesn’t like numbers; he likes infinity and philosophy, likes broken patterns and uncertainties. The thing about paradoxes is that they’re neat; impossible staircases are just closed, contained circuits, and Eames is daring and messy, a model of contradictions, lies and clever hands, and Eames would never love the way Ariadne does. Eames is a minor key, all complicated sharps and flats that shouldn’t work against the melody. Eames loves fast and hot, loves what he shouldn’t, today in love and tomorrow out of it.

“Eames,” she says, tries it out, the bizarreness of it. It’s not a name at all, she thinks.

“Yes, Ariadne?” he says, but his eyes are on Arthur, stuck, a thread snagged on a nail.

And that’s how it is, she thinks: airports and hotels, text messages and knowing you can’t figure each other out, the sharp line of Arthur’s throat and hurting each other and liking it, fitting and clashing. Gunpowder, she thinks, they smell like gunpowder, and Eames will never know Arthur and Arthur doesn’t care enough to know Eames. Love, that isn’t the type of love Ariadne wants. She’s not a schoolgirl, helpless or sweet, but she doesn’t want smoke and mirrors, maybes, sharp smiles hiding sharper teeth. There are different types of love, but Ariadne doesn’t want the cruel kind.

“Never mind,” she says.

+

Yusuf, perhaps.

Quiet, she thinks; she likes that. Eames fills the room, you can’t help but look at him, but Yusuf makes the room seem bigger and he means to, she thinks. Like an escape artist, always thinking, and she likes that less, because there’s such a thing as thinking too much, that knife’s edge where you learn too much about yourself. And what does Ariadne know about herself – nothing, really, knows that word, _love_ , knows she wants it, but doesn’t know why or how. Ariadne’s thoughts have boundaries, here is what I want to know and here is what I don’t. But Yusuf ignores those warning signs, pushes a little harder, digs a little deeper. Yusuf collects your cards without ever showing his hand, head bent low, and you watch him, watch him, until you tell yourself that Yusuf just can’t bother to look up. He looks up, though, Ariadne thinks. He just waits until you’re not looking.

Yusuf is always in his head and she feels nervous when they leave him a level above, because Ariadne may love numbers, but she also loves building, loves sun-washed marble and thin-as-air-glass, loves sleek sheets of metal and cities that sprawl out for miles in each directions, skyscrapers that blot out the skies. Yusuf, though, Yusuf, likes watching things dematerialize, likes volatility, things that burn. Yusuf likes to catalogue the rate of decay, wasting, and she hears stories she isn’t meant to, underground dens where the dying pretend they’re only looking for sleep.

“Good night,” he says to her, and she can count all his smiles on just one hand.

When he betrays them all, Ariadne pretends to be surprised, right alongside Arthur and Eames.

Not Yusuf, then. Not him.

+

Arthur, then.

Arthur is the simplest because he’s the most complicated. Arthur is military-sharp, is gunfire, is leader and follower. He’s rumpled and neat, runs so hot that he’s cold to the touch. Arthur, sly as a cat, Arthur who is the worst kind of con man because he only tells the truth. Dangerous like the blunt edge of a knife because at some point, you convince yourself that it really is blunt, but it’s only blunt relative to the sharp side, and just because Arthur is quiet, it doesn’t mean he’s safe. Arthur kills five projections without blinking, and when she wants to get out of the dream, he breaks her neck, voice soft as a lullaby.

How does Arthur love, she wonders, and thinks that he doesn’t love at all. Arthur is like gunfire, metallic around the edges. Arthur is the sort that your mother warns you about, and when you catch a rare smile, you think, this is it, here we are, this is a moment, but then he’s gone in the morning, and you can’t even remember what cologne he was wearing, the color of his eyes. Arthur wouldn’t know what to do without being surrounded on three sides, the fourth a dead-end, wouldn’t know what to do with a schoolgirl romance, soft blushes and easy touches. Arthur is dizzying the way the third glass of wine is, when you’ve got used to the sweetness and every sip after is a bitter one.

Eames thinks that Arthur doesn’t look at him, but that’s not true, because Arthur does look.

He just doesn’t care.

+

And then there’s Cobb.

Cobb. _Cobb_.

Cobb is all raw edges, like a torn scrap of silk. Cobb is genius gone awry, and they all go awry, eventually, but Cobb is to hell and back, tells her about limbo and empty cities, wandering, wanderlust, and she thinks, I would go to limbo for you, the years racking up like pennies in a bank. Cobb is a shirt done up wrong, the buttons misaligned. Cobb is infinite staircases, paradoxes heaped upon paradoxes, asks her if she wants to come dreaming with him, and then promptly gets her killed in his own dream. Cobb is waking up with a hangover, miserable, promising yourself you’ll never do this again and keeping that promise for one, two weeks, maybe. Cobb drives her insane, makes her want to scream, tells her it’s not good enough, not good enough; will I ever be good enough for you, she wants to yell, but the answer would be no and she doesn’t want to hear it, not yet, not ever. So she draws her mazes, hands them over, waits, thinks, is this something, is this real. Because Cobb might get her killed, but she doesn’t look at Mal, crazy Mal, a projection of crazy Cobb and his crazy dreams, Mal holding the knife, because all she can see is Cobb looking sick and dizzy, and she thinks, this has to be something.

It’s not schoolgirl love, because schoolgirl love isn’t willing to walk across broken glass. It starts like this, she thinks, in a café in Paris, watching him draw something, the curve of his wrist, the arc of his shoulder. And when he tells her that it’s just a dream, she thinks that it can’t be a dream because it feels so _real_. If I leaned over and kissed him right now, she thinks, he’d taste like chocolatines and café au lait.

I could fall in love with you, Ariadne thinks. Love, here I am, ready, ready for you, insanity, these desperate hearts. Flying, a dove’s wings against a blue sky, spiraling higher, higher. Quiet, right before sunrise breaks, parentheses bracketing our secrets, and there are no secrets, no confessions, no sins, just this. A rainstorm without thunder, just the soft pitter-patter against the grass, constant, the waves breaking against the shore, soft and loud and wild and calm and insane, so, so elaborately insane.

Maybe, she thinks. Maybe Cobb.

But then they’re in limbo, Limbo, with a capital _L_. And there’s Mal and he’s telling her to go, go, isn’t looking at her, and Ariadne thinks, I’m so in love with you, but the trouble with Cobb is that he’ll never fall in love with her, because his heart is tied to this shade between white and black, Mal, who is every shade of grey.

+

The dream ends in Los Angeles and Ariadne books a plane back to Paris.

I could fall in love, she thinks. Just not today.

+


End file.
